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Y. Wu*, P. Balatti*, M. Lorenzini, F. Zhao, W. Kim, A. Ajoudani: "A Teleoperation Interface for Loco-manipulation Control of Mobile Collaborative Robotic Assistant (MOCA)", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), July 2019.

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This paper presents a novel teleoperation interface that enables remote loco-manipulation control of a MObile Collaborative robotic Assistant (MOCA). MOCA is a new research platform developed at IIT, which is composed by a lightweight manipulator arm, a Pisa/IIT SoftHand, and a mobile platform driven by four Omni-directional wheels. A whole-body impedance controller is consequently developed to ensure accurate tracking of the impedance and position trajectories at MOCA end-effector by considering the causal interactions in such a dynamic system. The proposed teleoperation interface provides the user with two control modes: Locomotion and Manipulation. The Locomotion mode receives inputs from a personalised human Center-of-Pressure model, which enables real-time navigation of MOCA mobile base in the environment. The Manipulation mode receives inputs from a tele-impedance interface, which tracks human arm endpoint stiffness and trajectory profiles in real-time and replicates them using the MOCA’s whole-body impedance controller. To evaluate the performance of the proposed teleoperation interface in the execution of remote tasks with dynamic uncertainties, a sequence of challenging actions, i.e., navigation, door opening, and wall drilling, has been considered in the experimental setup.